By David Dayen, a lapsed blogger, now a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on Twitter @ddayen

There’s been an unlikely yet welcome resurgence of chatter about breaking up the nation’s largest and most powerful banks. Bloomberg’s story quantifying the too big to fail subsidy grabbed some eyeballs (and there’s an upcoming GAO report on the subsidy that will do the same). Sherrod Brown announced an unlikely pairing with David Vitter working on legislation on the subject. Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher is going to give a big speech on Friday on breaking up the banks… at CPAC, the largest conservative political conference of the year.

At the same time the unending stream of reports of abuses and fraudulent actions give fuel to the movement. And we’ll get another one Friday, when Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations releases their report, complete with a companion hearing, on the London “Fail Whale” trades, the losses for which stretch as high as $8 billion. Early reports suggest that the report will be unsparing. Levin’s committee did an excellent job in prior investigations of Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs (which they gift-wrapped to the Justice Department as a criminal referral, only to see DoJ toss it in the wastebasket). People I’ve talked to expect the hearing to be explosive.

As an excellent preview for the Friday fireworks, I urge you to read an astonishing new report, which I’ve embedded below, from analyst Josh Rosner of Graham-Fisher and Co. The best way to describe the report, “JPM – Out of Control,” is that it reads like a rap sheet. Notably, Rosner takes mortgage abuses almost entirely out of the equation, and yet still manages to fill a 45-page report with documented case after documented case of serious fraud and abuse, most of which JPM has already admitted to (at least in the sense of reaching a settlement; given out captured regulatory structure the end result is invariably a settlement with the “neither admit nor deny wrongdoing” boilerplate appended). Rosner writes, “we could not find another ‘systemically important’ domestic bank that has recently been subject to as many public, non-mortgage related, regulatory actions or consent orders.”

Obviously this contrasts with Jamie Dimon’s spotless reputation (at least in Washington) and his bold talk of a “fortress balance sheet.” Yet as you read the report, it’s hard to see the bank as anything but a criminal racket just days away from imploding, were it not propped up by implicit bailout guarantees and light-touch regulators. Rosner paints a picture of a corporation saddled with pervasive internal control problems, which end up costing shareholders, and which “could materially impact profitability in the future.” He calculates that since 2009, JPM has paid out $8.5 billion in settlements for its outlaw activity, which equals nearly 12% of net income over the same period.

It’s hard to summarize all of the documented instances in this report of JPM has been breaking the law, but here’s my best shot. I try to keep up on these matters, and yet some of these I’m learning about for the first time:

Bank Secrecy Act violations;
Money laundering for drug cartels;
Violations of sanction orders against Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor;
Violations related to the Vatican Bank scandal (get on this, Pope Francis!);
Violations of the Commodities Exchange Act;
Failure to segregate customer funds (including one CFTC case where the bank failed to segregate $725 million of its own money from a $9.6 billion account) in the US and UK;
Knowingly executing fictitious trades where the customer, with full knowledge of the bank, was on both sides of the deal;
Various SEC enforcement actions for misrepresentations of CDOs and mortgage-backed securities;
The AG settlement on foreclosure fraud;
The OCC settlement on foreclosure fraud;
Violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act;
Illegal flood insurance commissions;
Fraudulent sale of unregistered securities;
Auto-finance ripoffs;
Illegal increases of overdraft penalties;
Violations of federal ERISA laws as well as those of the state of New York;
Municipal bond market manipulations and acts of bid-rigging, including violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act;
Filing of unverified affidavits for credit card debt collections (“as a result of internal control failures that sound eerily similar to the industry’s mortgage servicing failures and foreclosure abuses”);
Energy market manipulation that triggered FERC lawsuits;
“Artificial market making” at Japanese affiliates;
Shifting trading losses on a currency trade to a customer account;
Fraudulent sales of derivatives to the city of Milan, Italy;
Obstruction of justice (including refusing the release of documents in the Bernie Madoff case as well as the case of Peregrine Financial).

And, exhale.

The sheer litany of illegal activities just overwhelms you. And these are only the ones where the company has entered into settlements or been sanctioned; it doesn’t even include ongoing investigations into things like Libor, illegally concealing inclusions of mortgage-backed securities in employer funds (another ERISA violation), the Fail Whale trades, and especially putback suits for mortgages, where a recent ruling by Judge Jed Rakoff has seriously increased exposure. While the risks are still very much alive and will continue to weigh on the firm, ultimately shareholders will pay, certainly not executives as long as the no-prosecutions standard holds.

Again, read the report, but two case studies stand out. First, JPM is trying to stick the public with losses related to its purchase of Washington Mutual and its related liabilities. Rosner documents painstakingly how JPM originally accepted the risks and responsibilities with the WaMu deal, and continued to do so for several years. But now that they see the actual possibility of mass mortgage-related putback claims, JPM wants to shift losses on over $190 billion in MBS onto the FDIC. They hope to get out from under as much as $5 billion in losses in this fashion. It’s impossible to logically follow JPM’s claim that they purchased WaMu but not any of its risk-related activities. The case “demonstrates the unwillingness to accept responsibility for their own management failures,” Rosner writes.

Finally, we have the Fail Whale trade, the subject of the Friday Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing. Rosner keys in on JPM’s internal “Task Force” report, which he compellingly characterizes as a complete whitewash. The Task Force was led by the heir apparent to the company, Michael Cavanagh (“like asking Joe Paterno to do the Penn State investigation instead of Louis Freeh,” in the words of former SEC chair Harvey Pitt). It limited the scope of the investigation to late 2011 and 2012, when now-public data clearly shows the problems at the Chief Investment Office going back years earlier, and fully known to senior management at the time. Rosner correctly brings up Sarbox Title III violations in conjunction with this, as top executives annually attested to the accuracy of financial statements now known to be untrue. The Task Force tried to exonerate Jamie Dimon by actually saying in a footnote that he was out of town for a period of time covered by the report.

And this footnote from the Task Force takes the cake:

The description of “what happened” is not a technical analysis of the Synthetic Credit Portfolio or the price movements in the instruments held in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio. Instead, it focuses on the trading decision-making process and actions taken (or not taken) by various JPMorgan personnel. The description of activities described in this Report (including the trading strategies) is based in significant measure on the recollections of the traders (and in particular the trader who had day-to-day responsibility for the Synthetic Credit Portfolio and was the primary architect of the trades in question) and others. The Task Force has not been able to independently verify all of these recollections.

Hey, who knows, don’t believe anything we’re saying, it’s not an investigation so much as an impressionistic collage.

Rosner has compiled an impressive dossier for any systemic risk regulator, if we had such things in more than name only in America. And I trust this will be a contribution to the ongoing debate – there really is one – over whether these mega-banks have become too big to manage, and too corrupt to continue.

About David Dayen

David is a contributing writer to Salon.com. He has been writing about politics since 2004. He spent three years writing for the FireDogLake News Desk; he’s also written for The New Republic, The American Prospect, The Guardian (UK), The Huffington Post, The Washington Monthly, Alternet, Democracy Journal and Pacific Standard, as well as multiple well-trafficked progressive blogs and websites. His has been a guest on MSNBC, CNN, Aljazeera, Russia Today, NPR, Pacifica Radio and Air America Radio. He has contributed to two anthology books, one about the Wisconsin labor uprising and another on the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act in Congress. Prior to writing about politics he worked for two decades as a television producer and editor. You can follow him on Twitter at @ddayen.

35 comments

Don’t stop there, when there is so much crime to report on. Here is a website reporting since 1999. I’d post mimeographs, but hey, enough living in the past, plenty going on right now. I’d hate to be whispered about as a hoarder.

There is also another blog that has been assembling articles reporting on the crimes, frauds and corruptions of Goldman Sachs. Daily, there are frauds to report and the site never runs out of material damaging to Goldman Sachs.

The problem is that every fucking consulting house, advisory firm, economic pundit with clout out there tells the political and legal leaders that holding banks truly accountable will destroy the system.

Of course, they’re all indirect (and often direct) beneficiaries of the criminal behavior the banks engage in while receiving immunity that is awarded to them by the very people insisting that the hypothetical logical end of a policy that actually involves confronting the banks in criminal cases is systemic failure and market mayhem.

Disgraceful, absolutely disgraceful. And nothing will get done, because that revolving door is poisoned, and the money influencing politics from bankster-types is only getting more and more powerful.

It’s impossible to find any ethical, honest individuals with a good track record. Those who are have been silenced by the system and marginalized by their colleagues who have been rewarded with jobs at financial centres and multinationals that give cover to the criminal banksters running business and policy across the West.

Hold on on a minute. I don’t want to start the day off being a big meanie, but are you the same Chris Engel who was over here a while ago arguing that the big mens of working class origins (like Lloyd Blankfein) shouldn’t have to be ethical–their only responsibility is to get their pile so they can “take care of their family”?

We do know that just this rationalization is frequently employed in financial services too, right?

How quaint. A litany of outrageous crimes, perpetrated, unchallenged, and wholly unpunished in plain view for all to see. One problem: we no longer have that useful little thing called “the rule of law” around to do anything about it.
Hey hand me that fiddle, our Emperor could use some accompaniment (as the flames grow ever higher…)

As Hillard Kaplan and Michael Gurven concluded in “The Natural History of Human Food Sharing and Cooperation,”:

We propose that multi-individual negotiations result in the emergence of social norms that are collectively enforced. We base this proposal on a result obtained by Boyd and Richerson (1992), and treated more recently by Bowles and Gintis (2000), in which cooperation is modeled with punishment. They found that cooperation can be stable in large groups, if non-cooperators are punished and if those who do not punish non-cooperators are also punished. In fact, they found that any social norm can be stable as long as both those who disobey and those who fail to punish those who disobey are punished.

If those whose duty it is to set and to enforce the rules of the game are out to maximize their own profits, a-la-Public Choice [i.e., the norms evangelized by neoclassical economics], there is no hope for the system.

What we find with the Obama adminsitration is:

1) That cooperators are punished
2) That those who would punish non-cooperators are punished

With this sort of regime, any outcome other than what is occurring is impossible.

I loved this note from John Byrne’s article ‘How To Fix Corporate Governance’ “In many ways, Enron and its dealings with Arthur Anderson are an anomaly, a perfect storm where greed, lax oversight, and outright fraud combined to unravel two of the nation’s largest companies.”

It brings to mind an album by the Doobie Brothers “What once were vices are now habits,”

Gracias, senor. Most people paying ordinary attention to politics and finance in ‘08 couldn’t have imagined the extent to which the Obama administration itself would become so intricately embedded with the financial-military-terror complex, to the point that it is actively collaborating in the corruption of democracy, the breakdown of law, and in waging multiple aggressive dirty-wars. While projecting character of integrity and thoughtfulness, and promoting visions of transformed government, a fair society and peaceful world, Obama’s hope and change agenda proved an outright, indefensible fraud on multiple counts — and with major media collusion. Impeachment is only a start. Otherwise, as Hugh said recently, “this will not end in tears but in blood.”

That’s funny because Obama has turned out exactly as I expected him to. I’m rarely right about anything but I told friends back in 2008 – not that any were listening to me – that Obama was Bush with a smilely face.

The fact is that Obama’s behavior has been as predictable as anyone else who crawled out of the swamp and into the White House. For those racist voters who thought changing the colour of the president’s skin would actually lead to change well, guess what, you were dead wrong. Nice of you to figure it out late, rather than never. Too bad most of your countrymen(and the majority of westerners) will never understand this because they don’t want to know.

Kudos! You are wiser, more perceptive, and maybe a llittle more cynical than most. I think many can be forgiven for inattention, wishful thinking or what I call “color-blind blindness” in ’08, but certainly not in 2012. Sixty-three million (fools, co-conspirators, or cowards) prove that you really can fool most of the people all of the time. It’s a stunning reminder of the power of fear and loathing in propaganda — mass-hypnosis — and that it most certainly can and is happening here.

So we can pretty much bet that the “left”‘s next Presidential offering will be another well-heeled aristocrat with a token membership in a protected class, so as to buy them eight more years to get neofeudalism sewn up in case they need it?

“The problem is that every fucking consulting house, advisory firm, economic pundit with clout out there tells the political and legal leaders that holding banks truly accountable will destroy the system.”

Which is, of course, what we need to do. The appeal to fear is just amazing. We have the national wealth to deal with the fallout from demolishing the system. And the system is so corrupt and broken that saving it only further corrodes our society. Like any good cost-benefit analysis, we have to compare the cost of action with the cost of inaction; here the numbers may be large, but the conclusion is clear: Shut this down, now!

True, David, and well said, Chris. the “too big to fail or jail” Armageddon defense is a flimsy fig-leaf used to shield officers from prosecution for manifest fraud, one often unchallenged out of fear or greed. Clearly, frog-marching perps like Dimon, Blankfein, and Corzine does not mean the banks themselves are shuttered or the global economy implodes. None of these financial terrorists are indispensable, and “breaking up” banks is loaded term that means not demolition but resizing, as any monopoly-trust might be by law. As I understand it, insolvent banks, are put into receivership, unwound, and restructured by FDIC or other orderly judicial process, such as the RTC on the Savings and Loan Collapse two decades ago.

As Bill Black has repeatedly noted, while hundreds of high-level perps were convicted and jailed in the S&L crisis, the institutions — the corporate (non)persons — often survived with minimal disruption and little interruption of core services. Yes, investors suffer financial loss in many cases, but those are voluntary, legally accepted risks for potential profit, whereas now, millions of innocent people on the knife edge of survival, who were not equity stakeholders, are crashing and burning in their stead.

All gain for investors and only pain for workers, children and retirees is inexcusable; but when TBTF is also then exploited to shred the safety net, it is EVIL.

Skippy… Raffaele Garofalo seems to be correct or more correct than the classicists and the concept of Free Will. Society aka the human environment is the greatest motivator, and if the psychological medium of self interest is the number one in[greed]ient…. Well… welcome to the the Asylum Titicut Follies – 1967

Follows the treatments of these patients and inmates by the guards, social workers, and their psychiatrists and chronicles the abhorrent behavior by the entire institution.

This film was actually banned by the Massachusetts State Court and was the first time in the United States that a film had been banned for reasons other than obscenity, immorality, or national security.

Thanks again, David Dayen, for a hopeful outlook on the latest outrage. Yes, the “resurgence of chatter” about breaking up TBTF banks is welcome, but it has to go beyond chatter. Breakups that leave smaller bank doors open have to accompany aggressive prosecutions for egregious fraud, as well as stripping of assets of convicted felons. Cost-of-business fines, consent orders, and quiet resignations of “rogue traders” are decidedly unfunny jokes at this point.

The stink of decomp taints nearly all major banks, mortgage lenders, and PE funds like MF Global. It’s a full-blown pandemic of high crimes, committed with conceited impunity and government complicity. It is dangerous and intolerable, and people of conscience and influence — journalists, clerics, academics, and especially judges and legislators — can no longer evade their duty and their oaths to forcefully challenge such open lawlessness.

Where has Levin’s permanently comatose Committee been for four years, when this was all so plainly visible? Where’s the Special Prosecutor, grand juries, where are the RICO indictments? Where is our Grillo? Most of our “leaders” are either conspicuously derelict or active co-conspirators. They must stand up and confront the scofflaws, regardless of political cost. In action is inexcusable. When there is a reckoning, people in positions of influence will be called to account for their part in the outcome. It needn’t be a reign of terror, but the longer the corruption and attendant injury persist, the rougher the eventual justice will be.

The following statement was pulled out of Tax Facts – — It was written in the 1920’s (Twenties) – close to one hundred years ago!!!!! – It seems to sum-up the DOJ leadership’s cowardice to do their mandate!!!. thank god someone is pressing them – but ohh how it gets ignored in the media – The news has so much they could be reporting on besides the Romney tape, the power struggle in DC, the deficit horse race. – it is a sad time for justice and democracy – this republic.

“He isn’t really a big time crook unless you must let him alone to prevent the loss of public confidence.”

Finally someone has started to compile the JPM criminal dossier. There should be a crime wiki on the web for each money center bank where people can report and investigate bank crime.

These mega-banks are little different than crime families where each division is pushed into criminal behavior by the psychopathic profit expectations of top management (crime bosses). It’s all about dying with the biggest pile of stuff and whowever you run over on the way there be damned.

5 years ago yesterday, Hank Paulson gave Slimin Dimon Bear Stearns for a birhtday present, thus guaranteeing most of us a cat food future. Later, Paulson was going to give give Slimie Morgan Stanley, but Nomura jumped in and screwed that deal. To console Slimnin’,Paulson pressed the FDIC gave him WaMu, which Slimie stripped clean and now wants to unload the rotting carcass back onto the FDIC.

Thanks Sheila for your service. And I still call for an old fashioned solution to the varmint problem we have in Amerikkkan banking today.

Until perps do jail time we will remain in the deep morass of financial stupidity and political corruption.
Our system is totally corrupt and totally out of control, political, domestic and foreign policy wise.
We’ve forgotten how “messes” have to be cleaned up….we’re good at using “new” stuff, but bad on cleaning up the messes left behind…..

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon intentionally withheld critical profit and loss data from federal regulators at a time that it could have provided damaging information about what eventually became a more-than-$6.2 billion trading loss in credit derivatives, according to a Senate panel report released Thursday.

The report charges America’s largest bank by assets with ignoring its own limits on risk taking, manipulating risk models to avoid detection, ignoring warnings from traders and misinforming the public and federal regulators about growing losses.
At issue are J.P. Morgan’s JPM -1.92% trading losses, which were conducted out of its London investment office — and attributed partly to a trader, Bruno Michel Iksil, dubbed the “London whale” for his large positions in credit derivatives. The report notes that the current status of the losses is unclear because J.P. Morgan dismantled the portfolio late last year, moving some funds to its investment banking unit.

It includes dozens of examples in which trader warnings were ignored while risk managers at the institution appeared unaware of losses. It adds that the bank’s chief government regulator appeared oblivious in many instances or was denied critical information.

Levin noted that the bank breached key risk limits 170 times in the first three months of 2012, followed by 160 breaches in the next month, April. The report also said a J.P. Morgan internal investigation into the losses was insufficient.
“The bank disregarded the warning signals of this huge ramp up in risk, they allowed the CIO to raise the risk limit, manipulate the risk measurement models to continue trading despite all of the red flags,” Levin told reporters in a briefing on the report.

However, the report does have one example showing that Dimon intentionally sought to cut off regulators from critical daily profit and loss trading data at a time that it could have started to provide damaging information about trading losses at the firm.

Specifically, in late January, 2012, as losses were increasing, the report said Dimon ordered the bank to stop providing a daily investment bank profit and loss report to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the institution’s chief regulator, because he believed it was too much information to provide to the OCC.
However, Douglas Braunstein, J.P. Morgan Chase’s chief financial officer at the time, restored the daily report soon afterward at the OCC’s request. But, according to the investigation, “Dimon reportedly raised his voice in anger” at Braunstein and disclosed that he had ordered the halt to the reports. Dimon said the OCC didn’t need daily profit and loss figures for the investment bank, according to the report.http://www.marketwatch.com/story/senate-jp-morgans-dimon-withheld-loss-data-2013-03-14?

Add to the overwhelming litany: $4.6 million gift Jamie Dimon gave to the NYPD just a few months before Occupy Wall Street broke out! (it was said at the time, the money was to purchase laptops for patrol cars.)

Land Swindles and Bank Looting, MERS to WaMu and what Lehman Bros. to the Keating 5 and all those Colonias and Paper Subdivisions …….. Can You Say RICO REALTY
Welcome To Judson Witham’s War
Enjoy The Show
Dear Mr Sneiderman, Mt Robert Mueller, Lanny Breuer, IRS Et Al
(202) 514-2000ffetf@usdoj.gov

Vast Laundering of DRUG Profits from the Sales of Drugs …… How Many Sales and IncomeWas TAXES were collected and How Much of the Money SEIZED from all these Banks LIKE HSBC et et al ZIONS, BofA and Citi, Wells Fargo, Wachovia, JP Morgan, Gold In Sacks etc etc etc etc …..

Vast Laundering of DRUG Profits from the Sales of Drugs …… How Many Sales and IncomeWas TAXES were collected and How Much of the Money SEIZED from all these Banks LIKE HSBC et et al ZIONS, BofA and Citi, Wells Fargo, Wachovia, JP Morgan, Gold In Sacks etc etc etc etc …..

(Reuters) – Bank executives who violate anti-money laundering laws may soon face harsher punishment in the United States as regulators consider ways to step up the fight against illicit money flows.
New rules are being weighed that will hold individuals specifically liable, and older rules – rarely used to take action against executives – will also be explored, top officials from the Office of the Comptroller of Currency and the Treasury Department’s illicit finance unit told lawmakers on Thursday.
Regulators and law enforcement authorities have recently settled with top banks, including HSBC Holdings Plc, which in December agreed to pay a record $1.9 billion to resolve charges it laundered a river of drug money from Mexico. It entered into a deferred prosecution agreement, and no bank employees were charged in connection with the case.
Senators on Thursday focused on that discrepancy and attacked regulators for what they described as lax enforcement. SEE STORYhttp://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/07/us-banks-moneylaundering-idUSBRE9260SQ20130307

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Judson Witham wrote:
Hmmm I’m Thinking Old Swamp Jud and the Catbirds been right for an awefully long time.

I may just be owed a Huge Whistle Blowers Reward ?????
I mean First American Title and MERS sure have screwed an awfully lot of BANK’S and their Customers, The Taxpayers and Government have taken it in the Shorts HUH.

Good Old Judson Exposed what Western Bancorporation and all those Crooked Ass Land Deals …. You know the Very Heart of the Realty Cons behind all the Liars Loans and Subprime NO DOCS Mortgages and all the other FRAUDS associated with the ENTIRE DEBACLE.

The Paper Land Con and Felonious Colonias and what Western Bank American Title and the Great Texas Bank Job ….. Yes Please I’d Like My Whistle Blowers Reward ….. Thank You Very Much